Black and White

Today as I was Dad's transcriptionist for the business I saw an X-ray that looked like its owner had inhaled a ton of smoke. The report was "Stable Fibrosis" since I figured I actually saw this one I pointed at the smoke and asked him if that was the fibrosis.

"Nope." He said, "That's the hilum. The hilum is always busy."

Later, he read one X-ray as "Pleural disease." Since I knew where pleural thickening always happened and I didn't see anything, I asked him where it was. He pointed to a little white stripe in the area. I'd say whatever it was, it couldn't be that bad. It was puny.

Later, he read "Biapical scarring." Now I was absolutely sure that "Biapical" was the top of both lungs, but they both looked perfectly healthy. I asked him again where the abnormality was. He pointed at two little stripes that were immediately next to the collar bone.

Dad said the key to reading X-rays is to know which areas are supposed to be black and which ones are supposed to be white. I don't get it.

Tournament

Whooee. That was exhausting. I only got third place, though. The sad thing was that only 13 people showed up, although 15 were pre-registered and 2 people showed up without pre-registering. Without fifteen people, the tournament was E1, meaning you could get an E if you were first place, although most people were already D's and E's. Imagine signing up online and not showing up. Lame. Oh yeah, and my body cord spontaneously combusted. It was ripped to pieces. It was so unfortunate. It is probably irreparable. I have no idea how to break it to Mom since this is the first tournament it was used in. (My last body cord was ruptured at the last tournament. These things are so short-lived.)

First Sunburn

I've finally gotten the first sunburn of the season. I had forgotten how painful it was. It surprises me that it took so long for the first sunburn to appear: It is already almost the end of June. It must be because our pool visits are normally only one hour but yesterday I swam for four hours. Also the fact that I never had to get out of the water for thunder contributed to my time in the sun. My sunburn is kind of strange because every part of me is tomato colored now except my stomach. I look like a red penguin. I've heard of the farmer's tan, but the penguin's tan? No country music girl is going to go for that!

Politics

What struck me at tonight's political pow-wow was how few people under the age of forty there were. I realized this when the speaker, Judge Mike Carter, was talking about how everything we do is for the future and for our children. If that's so, how come the people with the most vested interest in the matter are the ones lazing about? The people who currently fight the hardest are the people who will be dead before the repercussions of Obama's ludicrous healthcare bill are actually felt! One guy there had been a "tax accessor" for 80 years! This guy isn't even going to live until 2012 when the healthcare bill goes into effect!

I saw two young people there besides myself. They were talking to each other about Facebook and their friend who didn't show up. I was glad to see young blood. Turned out they were Zach Wamp's two children. Please people! Fight the good fight! It's for your future!

Dinner

Alexie and I have been splitting dinners. The problem we've been having recently is how to split them. It was easy during the school year, because our schedules were so routine. I was gone on Wednesdays and Thursdays, she was gone Mondays. Now, however, it seems like no week has the same routine. One week she got together with her friends five days of the week. The next week I go out almost every afternoon. It has become a sort of "Whoever is here cooks" kind of schedule. Not very rigorous, but it suits me just fine since I'm always off to somewhere exciting. Tonight I go to a fuddy-duddy cookout for Zach Wamp, Republican candidate for governor. Hooray! Politics!

Ending Soon

It seems like I just began this job and it is already winding down to an end. Next week there are two labs and a final. Then it is over. What a serious bummer! In a scant seven days I will be unemployed again. I suppose I'll revive my deceased workout program (It died after twenty-six days.) or I'll check out some more books at the library since I've been doing that a lot recently. What to do...

Ambiguous Headline

On the UTC webpage there is a headline that reads "UTC Department of Justice sponsors hate crime forum." What I understood was that "sponsors" was the subject and "hate" was the verb. I clicked on it expecting to see a story about controversy. Alas. "Sponsors" was the verb. "Hate" was just an adjective describing the forum. (Which it probably deserves.) So instead of a story about sponsors hating a forum, I get a story about a department sponsoring a forum. Booooring.

The Extra Digit

Today in lab I had one guy come up to me with his paper and I knew that he had a problem. You can always tell on their faces when they are angry/disgusted.

"Hey, I know that NaOH is a strong base, but the number it is returning according to her chart (I assume he's referring to Dr. Potts. He seems to be pretty bitter ever since she kicked him out of lab for coming 11 minutes late.) this value would show me that it was a weak base."

I assume that he's had it up to here with not getting the required results on his lab report and I can sympathize. Dad once told me that the best thing to do was work backwards: figure out the theoretical answer first and make up "real-life" measurements to match. (When I told two girls that acetic acid was a weak acid not a strong acid and couldn't have a value of 4963, they made up a value: 1234. How obvious was that?)

So I looked at it prepared to tell him that the Verniers were new so we weren't sure they all worked and sometimes the beakers had residue, blah blah blah, etc. However I was shocked to see his value was approximately 24000. He had been reading it as 2400 since the break-off point was 2500 and he naturally assumed that all the values would be within 50 of the break-off point. In reality all the strong acids have five digits and the weak acids have four. Pretty obvious. Anyway I pointed this out and was satisfied to see all his rage against the machine was away. He didn't have any more questions after that. Hooray for learning experiences!

Error

According to the Application of the sample mean to the population, everyone who reads my blog is also an innie. Weird. Let's see if I can think of some logical reasons that this might be so.

Alexie says that only freaks and misfits have outie belly buttons. She says they are exceedingly rare. That's why only David has one. Again Alexie says that David is so tightly tied around the apron strings that his umbilical cord didn't come out until 18 months after he was born. Ha ha ha!

Therefore everyone who reads my blog is clearly not a freak and a misfit. Secondly, David doesn't read my blog...

2.7%

Alright, if there are 10 people playing Mafia three times, what is the probability that one person is Mafia in all three games? Since there are 3 mafia, it comes out to 2.7%. Pretty long odds, but it happened yesterday. My brother Andrew somehow managed to pull an Ace all 3 times. I envy that kind of statistical defiance. I hate being a townsperson.

What I thought of at the time was Interstellar Pig. Andrew must be inextricably linked to a Fate of Mafia.

Library

The library recently reorganized itself making everything hard to find. I was looking in the catalog and the place to find it was "FIC." I kept trying to figure out what it stood for. Since I was so used to "FA" standing for "Fine Arts" I somehow had a firm idea that the "F" standed for "Fine." However after a bit of hmmmming and haaaahing, I realized it stood for "Fiction." Well, duh.

P.S. Alexie, who was once sick and now is better, just told me that FIC was always fiction. Nothing new. Drat.

Overtime

I've always had a basic grasp on the theory of working overtime, but I suppose the closest I've ever gotten to experiencing it was this morning. Today the Chemistry students in my lab were taking a test so I wasn't needed for teaching. Therefore they had me do an organizational bit in one of the storerooms. I had gone in meaning to ask whether I would be working for one hour or two, but my question was answered right away when Mr. Narramore told Luke and me that we were welcome to work until twelve: three and a half hours in all. I punched out at 11:30. Working overtime wasn't as fun as I thought it would be.

Complementary Opposites

There aren't many complementary opposites in the world. In fact, I might even have made the term up. For those of you who don't know Complementary Opposites are opposites that cover everything. For example: Black and White are not complementary opposites because things can be gray, or blue, etc. But Dead and Alive are complementary opposites because you are either one or you are the other. Period. However the poll question: Are you Dead or Alive? would be pretty boring. It would really only tell me how many of you aren't taking my poll questions seriously. (Answer: Most of you, including myself)

Anyways, enjoy your new poll. FYI an Innie is someone whose belly button is sunk into their stomach and an Outie is someone whose belly button sticks out. Don't worry this poll subscribes to the Law of Hippa and the information you give us will not be disclosed to anyone but your personal physicians and interested millionaires.

Demographic Survey

My demographic survey is complete! I have only one human in my entire audience! Who could have guessed! I have mostly elves and orcs (which are technically elves, it is just that they became evil and therefore became hideously ugly. You know, happens all the time in real life.) Surprisingly I don't have any dwarves. Real shocker there. I would think that my brothers were actually dwarves in disguise given their love of everything Dwarf Fortress.

Oh yeah, I'm probably going to take a new tack to polls. I'm going to start using true/false and yes/no questions because I simply don't have as many readers as I have options in Multiple Choice questions.

Homeschool Convention

This morning I was up at 6:00. Mom had signed up to help set up the Annual Used Book Sale of All Homeschoolerness. (Disclaimer: Not actual name) It seems that whenever something homeschooly needs to be organized, Mom is there. And usually there are two or three strong young sons of hers that were somehow roped into helping too. David and I went to help this morning. It wasn't too hard. All we did was tape of some aisles and set up tables. It was kind of like setting up for fencing except exponentially larger. Speaking of fencers, we saw at least five fencing families there. I guess we were filling in as the makeshift security. In addition, we saw Heather's old car that has the bumper sticker "This car is protected by a woman with a sword" still on it. I hope that family bumps into the Colemans' table where Joseph was advertising our fencing group. More members!

Music Camp

Our kids are attending another church's VBS this week. We've all been doing it for years. Every year Covenant Pres puts on a bible musical and the McPhersons join for the ride (despite obvious lack of musical abilities.) I think this year is the story of Gideon, but don't quote me on that. I'm going to find out at the end of the week when I go cheer them on in their little performance. You see? Shakespeare camp isn't the only camp insane enough to put on a play with only one week of practice!

Coincidence: Music Camp was where I first met Josh Grace, when he played Shadrach and I played Abednego. I saw him just last night at fencing. I was going to ask whether his sisters were going to be in it, but didn't find a chance.

Shiny Lab

Grote Hall has been renovated and it looks great! It still reeks of chemicals, but hey, what else would it smell like? Popcorn? Please. Everything in the new lab is shiny. Shiny new hoods. Shiny new whiteboards. In fact, the shiny new counters are covered by a sheet of weird shiny material to protect them from disgusting chemical spills. It is so shiny!

Bimodals

There are very few things that I remember from classes I've taken. One of them is the Bimodal, which I learned about in Statistics. We were learning about different types of curves and situations in which you would see them. The bimodal is the curve that defines the grade distribution in classrooms. What happens is that there are two normal curves right next to each other, one centered over D's and one centered over B's. Dr. Edwards said this is because there are two types of people: Those who try and those who don't. If everyone tried there would be a normal curve, but since there are two types of people there are two normal curves overlapping each other.

Anyway, I have seen two bimodal curves in fencing. First, the percentage of matches that the fencer wins and second the number of matches that the fencer has fought.

The first one starts out as a very drastic bimodal. Everyone either wins their first one or loses their first one. Everyone is either 100% or 0%. Obviously since for every winner there is a loser, there would be a bimodal. Interestingly, the curve become more and more normal as time progresses as people with good first days start having bad days and people with bad first days start having good days.

The second one starts out normal. Everyone fences pretty much the same number the first day. Everyone fights about 1-4 matches. However as time passes it becomes clear the people who fight four the first day will fight four for the rest of the season and people who fight one will only fight one a day for the rest of the season. Therefore in a matter of weeks there is a huge discrepancy in the number of matches and we have our bimodal: People who fence a lot and people who fence a little.

Math Review

Woo hoo! First day at my new job! Hop all around! Hooray! I'm going back tomorrow at 8:00 as well. Goody.

Today we did math review. It was amazing how many people could not convert units. It was stunning. You would think a question that said: "A car travels 10 miles. The car travels 5 miles per gallon. How many gallons does it use?" Would be pretty easy. Alas, no. I had to set up question 7 about lightning strikes for just about every team in the room. If you hear the thunder in 3.5 seconds and sound travels at 1074 feet per second, how many miles away is the lightning strike? No one could grasp that the speed was just another conversion factor. They all went nuts.

Oh yeah, there was one girl who asked me how many inches was in a foot. I responded: "Well, the question assumes that you know that there are 12 inches in a foot." I wonder if she was foreign... but if that were the case she wouldn't have had so much trouble converting centimeters to meters...

Poof

You may have noticed that I removed all the poll gadgets gunking up the side of my blog. You may not have cared. If you ever do care enough to look back at all the polls and poll results posts, they all happen to be labeled "Polls." Just click the label at the bottom of this blog post and a world of useless public opinion information will be made open to you. Whoop.

Consensus

Alright, general consensus states that the word "Carl" has only one syllable in it, but then again general consensus also states that sausages are edible, so you know how much you can trust it.

Also, no one has published a poem containing the word "Carl" in it. For shame. Everyone loses the Poem Contest. I will keep the Grand Prize for myself. It is all mine! I'm not even going to tell any one what it is lest they envy it and seek my life for it! Ha!

Alright. Here's the next poll: If you were a redshirt from Lord of the Rings, what race would you belong to!?!? Man, Elf, Dwarf, Orc.

There are two reasons that "Hobbit" is not a choice. 1) I consider five options to be too many when polling four people. 2) Hobbits generally don't form into armies and get decimated.

Poem Contest

Alright, in celebration of the closing of the poll, write a poem about "Carl." It can be any type of poem: limerick, haiku, you name it. But try to fit "Carl" into your meter and comment on how unbecomingly his name fits into one-syllable slots. Leave your poems in the comment section of this blog post.

If you don't know who Carl is, you can look him up here: http://duncan-oh-yeah.blogspot.com/2009/05/dads-new-friend-carl.html

For some reason Dad can still remember this guy and recently commented on the one year anniversary. Who would have guessed that it would be conveniently immortalized in a blog post!

Programming Error

Alright, most people who read this won't understand how this works, but I'll try my best to explain it. This all began last week when Jared asked me to fence him without it going on to the record. I realized that the reason for this was that he thought that last semester he wasn't promoted because his battles against Green knights hurt his score. To remedy this, I modified it so that matches against knights of two more or less than you wouldn't contribute to your scores. It changed from

If Wcolor > LColor then increase Winner's wins against lowers
If Wcolor < LColor then increase Winner's wins against highers

to

If Wcolo = LColor+1 then increase Winner's wins against lowers
If Wcolor = LColor-1 then increase Winner's wins against highers

All of a sudden there were some random matches that weren't recorded. I was stunned. What could be happening? When I went back to look at the code, I saw it instantly. If you didn't see it, you can look at it above. The variable "Wcolo" does not exist. Therefore if the winner's color was higher than the loser's color, the match wasn't recorded. I went ahead and put them in by hand since they were all recorded in the "Today's Matches" section. And of course I fixed the error.

E-mail Check

I checked my e-mail yesterday and found a message from Matthew M. that said "Hey Duncan! Would tomorrow be a good time to do my lines?" Unfortunately it was sent to me May 28, three days before I harvested it. That's pretty awkward. Now it is so close to the Friday rehearsal, it seems pointless to ask him to practice it. Huh. How tragic.

Ants

Recently Andrew put his retainer in his mouth and felt something odd. You know the feeling: "Oh no!" You think. "My retainer is off by a fraction of a degree and now it is moving my teeth in all sorts of insane directions!" Andrew popped it out and looked at it. He saw the source of his problem: there were ants crawling all over his retainer.

This has gone on quite long enough. According to the parents, the Bug Man has already been called and is on his way. I say that it is time to move beyond these diplomatic tactics. I say we kidnap an ant, brainwash it, give it an ant-sized flamethrower and turn it into Ant Rambo. Then he can go back to his little nest and kill everyone Rambo-style. Then when he turns on us we can just squash him.